Chapter 73: The Ultimate Blue-Eyes Fusion
Flip the top five cards of your Deck. For each Tuner among them, Shooting Star Dragon can attack that many times this turn.
That was Shooting Star Dragon's effect.
And Rin Seiya flipped five Tuners straight off the top.
Five consecutive attacks. The fourth-year joint duel wasn't even a contest.
With that, Synchro Academy had locked up two wins before the upper years had even finished competing. The championship was practically settled.
"Getting pushed around this badly by Synchro Academy. Embarrassing."
The voice cut through the noise of the crowd like a blade—and somehow matched the energy Rin Seiya's entrance had built, picking it up without missing a beat and driving it higher.
"K-Kaiba Chiaki?!"
"When did she get back from outside the Tower?!"
"Fusion Academy's strongest duelist is showing up in the very first joint duel of the new semester?!"
"I paid fifteen hundred for this ticket. Someone pinch me."
Nobody was pinching anyone. The ticket scalpers, on the other hand, were very busy slapping their own knees.
If Chiha plus Rin Seiya had made this ticket worth triple its face value, adding Kaiba Chiaki to the mix made it worth ten times over. And there wasn't a single person in the venue who would have argued otherwise.
This was what Academy City's top duelists meant for a crowd. And with the rule that each student only got one shot per semester to represent their academy, having three of them appear on the same day turned the whole event into something that might not be replicated for years.
They couldn't share a stage—different year groups, different rounds. But watching them appear one after another, each one dismantling their opponents in a completely different way, hit its own kind of satisfaction.
"I'll tear this stage apart with the most evolved dragon in existence!"
Kaiba Chiaki swept her silver coat back, dragged four cards across her Duel Disk in a single motion, and launched them toward the ceiling.
"I FUSION SUMMON using three Blue-Eyes White Dragons from my hand!!"
Three Blue-Eyes White Dragon cards. Plus Polymerization. Opening hand.
Amano stared.
The aesthetic was identical to Seto Kaiba himself—raw aggression, maximum Dragons, zero regard for any other strategy. The apple hadn't fallen far from the tree.
The three white dragon cards screamed in the cyber lighting as the fusion vortex opened above the stage, splitting the air like a dimensional tear. Something massive pushed through from the other side.
Three heads. Six eyes. One enormous, supremely irritated dragon.
"FUSION SUMMON! BLUE-EYES ULTIMATE DRAGON!!"
Not the vanilla version. Not the blank-effect Normal Monster version.
Neo Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon.
Amano recalibrated his expectations slightly. The top-tier duelists in this world were packing more firepower than he'd initially given them credit for.
Neo Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon. 4500 ATK. Three attacks per turn. The fifth-year joint duel ended the way the third-year round had—quickly, decisively, and with a lot of overkill damage stacked up on both opponents.
And that was that.
The curtain came down on the most star-studded first joint duel in recent memory.
Final record: Synchro Academy, two wins. Fusion Academy, two wins. Xyz Academy, one win.
But when the tiebreaker calculation factored in total eliminations, both Amano and Rin Seiya had double-killed their opponents. Yanagiji had grabbed an elimination before going down in the second-year round. The numbers stacked up in Synchro Academy's favor.
Final result: Synchro Academy, first place. Their first championship in two years.
"LET'S GOOO! WE'RE CHAMPIONS!"
Chiaki's final-round demolition hadn't put a dent in the Synchro students' enthusiasm. Two years was a long time to wait, and the moment it was official, the noise was deafening.
Amano was immediately back in the center of it, surrounded and celebrated for the second time in an hour. His double-elimination victory had been a direct contributor to the final standings, and the class made sure he knew it.
But if Amano was one hero of the day, the other was the last person anyone had expected to see on that stage—Rin Seiya, appearing in the very first joint duel of the semester when she could have waited.
Which brought Amano back to the message sitting in his VSN inbox.
[If I win, will you grant me one request?]
Was that what she meant by winning? The whole joint duel?
But why send it to him?
The crowd going suddenly silent answered the question before he could.
Class 1-E students stood completely frozen, not daring to make a sound.
"S-Seiya-senpai..."
"She's... she's coming over here? To E Class?"
"She's even prettier up close, oh no—"
Rin Seiya had a lollipop tucked into one cheek, the candy creating a small bulge in her face. Her school uniform looked slightly too large for her, hanging loose off her shoulders in a way that should have looked sloppy and somehow didn't. She walked over to Amano with the easy, unbothered pace of someone who had never once worried about whether she was welcome somewhere.
She was clearly headed straight for him.
The presence she carried—whether it was the striking white hair that caught every light in the room, or simply the weight of being Synchro Academy's strongest duelist—seemed to quietly outshine even Nanki'in Sakuya standing right beside Amano.
This was only their second meeting. The first had been on the small hill at Synchro Academy, where Amano hadn't known yet that the strange, unpredictable girl watching the fake stars was the most feared duelist in their school.
He still didn't fully understand how her mind worked.
Rin pulled the lollipop out of her mouth and spoke first.
"I won, junior."
"Oh—yeah!" Amano nodded. "Congratulations, senpai."
Rin's brow creased slightly at the response.
"You saw my VSN message, didn't you? You really need to stop leaving messages on read. It's a terrible habit."
So it hadn't been a mistake. She had sent that message to him deliberately.
And the 'you always do this'—did that mean the card photo she'd sent before wasn't a mass post either?
"I saw it," Amano said.
"Good. I'll message you on VSN after school." She pointed the lollipop stick at him. "And don't leave it on read this time. Basic courtesy to your seniors, please."
She said it with all the authority of someone issuing a non-negotiable instruction, then walked away through the stunned Class 1-E crowd, swaying slightly as she went.
Brief silence.
Then Amano was surrounded again—but this time the energy was different.
"Duel Committee Rep, when exactly did you meet Rin Seiya-senpai?! And why didn't you tell any of us?!"
"She's literally the academy goddess and you've been keeping her to yourself?!"
"You exchanged VSN contacts with her?! Do you know how many rich kids from elite families have tried to get her contact info and been shot down flat?!"
"What about Class Monitor?! How is Class Monitor supposed to feel about this?!"
Somehow Sakuya had gotten dragged into it.
"I'm fine," Nanki'in Sakuya said, clearing her throat with precisely calibrated dignity. "I'm simply curious—what do you two usually talk about on VSN? Not that you have to tell me."
It wasn't really a secret. If anything, it was embarrassingly mundane.
Amano pulled up the chat log and showed the whole class, figuring the fastest way to defuse the jealousy was to reveal how completely unremarkable their conversation history actually was.
A few brief exchanges. Casual greetings. Nothing worth burning anyone at the stake over.
Except for that one message—[If I win, will you grant me one request?]—and the mysterious card photo she'd sent before.
Then, while he was holding the phone up for the whole class to see, a new message came in.
[I started a club recently. Come find me alone after school, junior.]
The temperature in the group dropped by several degrees.
Amano was fairly sure he spotted someone in the back of the crowd quietly lighting a torch.